Granite stela of Hor and
Suty

Possibly from Thebes,
Egypt18th Dynasty, around 1350
BC

'Overseers of Works of Amun' in
the reign of Amenhotep III

Hor and Suty were twin brothers who held the
titles of 'Overseer of Works' of
Amun
in Thebes, and in Karnak in particular. They set up this large
stela
to themselves. The frame is inscribed with invocations for funerary
offerings; the central area shows the brothers offering to
Osiris
and
Anubis,
above twenty-one lines of a hymn to the sun-god Re. It would appear
that these twins divided the work to be done between
them.

The stela is
particularly important as evidence for the development of solar
theology during the New Kingdom (about 1550-1070 BC). In this
period increasing importance was placed in the life-giving
qualities of the light of the sun-god, and in the physical
manifestation of the sun, the disc known in Egyptian as Aten. Many
scholars believe that this reached its peak with the so-called
'heretic pharaoh' Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV), much of
whose religious beliefs seem to have been devoted to the worship of
the disc and its light.

At
some later date it seems that Hor and Suty fell out of favour,
since both their figures and most examples of their names have been
carefully erased. The defacement of inscriptions was a common
practice in ancient Egypt.